Stokke og Leger Uten Grenser

In 2015, I moved with my family from Belgium to Norway. Our daughter had just turned ten. We had much stuff to get rid of before loading on a truck what we needed to keep. One of the objects that we donated to friends, was our daughter’s Tripp Trapp, a happy green colour with a red and white striped cushion. It was actually hard to let go of the chair that grew with our child, gave her stability and kept her safe through her early years.

Child mortality figures from the same year, as found on childmortality.org, illustrate the immense contrast between different countries. In Belgium, four children out of every thousand born alive do not live to see their fifth birthday (in Norway, that was only three). By contrast, In Afghanistan an estimated 91 children per thousand died before turning five.

There are various factors that conspire to such a low life expectancy. Traditionally, few Afghan women have a chance to study and become doctors or nurses, yet culturally it is not really acceptable for a male health worker to touch a female patient. On top of this, decades of warfare have decimated health facilities and those that are functioning remain under constant threat, as the bombing of our hospital in Kunduz (also in 2015) so brutally illustrated.

The maternity hospital that Leger Uten Grenser set up in Khost, near the border with Pakistan, addresses this. It opened in 2012, and as the deputy head of the hospital, Salamat Khan Mandozai, told an Afghan news agency recently, “…the number of our patients is increasing with each passing year, there were 21,000 childbirths only in 2016 with 2,850 of them complicated or conceived through surgical operation.” He added that not a single child mortality case had been reported in Khost in the third quarter of 2016.

For me personally, it is hard to find a more appropriate partner for our work in this part of Afghanistan than Stokke. There are no objective reasons why a child born there should not have the same chance to live a life of colour, to grow in safety, as my daughter has been enjoying. Together with you we will continue working on this. And we hope that we can draw every employee at Stokke into it, by making them realise and feel that they, and their employer, are making a very direct contribution to the lives of thousands of children who just happened to be born at the wrong place and the wrong time. Our partnership makes an immense difference.

Stokke og Leger Uten Grenser

In 2015, I moved with my family from Belgium to Norway. Our daughter had just turned ten. We had much stuff to get rid of before loading on a truck what we needed to keep. One of the objects that we donated to friends, was our daughter’s Tripp Trapp, a happy green colour with a red and white striped cushion. It was actually hard to let go of the chair that grew with our child, gave her stability and kept her safe through her early years.

Child mortality figures from the same year, as found on childmortality.org, illustrate the immense contrast between different countries. In Belgium, four children out of every thousand born alive do not live to see their fifth birthday (in Norway, that was only three). By contrast, In Afghanistan an estimated 91 children per thousand died before turning five.

There are various factors that conspire to such a low life expectancy. Traditionally, few Afghan women have a chance to study and become doctors or nurses, yet culturally it is not really acceptable for a male health worker to touch a female patient. On top of this, decades of warfare have decimated health facilities and those that are functioning remain under constant threat, as the bombing of our hospital in Kunduz (also in 2015) so brutally illustrated.

The maternity hospital that Leger Uten Grenser set up in Khost, near the border with Pakistan, addresses this. It opened in 2012, and as the deputy head of the hospital, Salamat Khan Mandozai, told an Afghan news agency recently, “…the number of our patients is increasing with each passing year, there were 21,000 childbirths only in 2016 with 2,850 of them complicated or conceived through surgical operation.” He added that not a single child mortality case had been reported in Khost in the third quarter of 2016.

For me personally, it is hard to find a more appropriate partner for our work in this part of Afghanistan than Stokke. There are no objective reasons why a child born there should not have the same chance to live a life of colour, to grow in safety, as my daughter has been enjoying. Together with you we will continue working on this. And we hope that we can draw every employee at Stokke into it, by making them realise and feel that they, and their employer, are making a very direct contribution to the lives of thousands of children who just happened to be born at the wrong place and the wrong time. Our partnership makes an immense difference.